WASHINGTON – Are you ready for the way you are paid for seeing patients to change, and not just change, but change dramatically?
The value-based care system of reimbursement for primary care physicians under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) is expected to take effect beginning in 2019, but how those payments will be made will be based on measurements of your overall performance in 2017. Will you be ready?
“Times are changing, and we need to change with them,” says Dr. Nitin Damle, the incoming president of the American College of Physicians, and an internist with South County Internal Medicine, Wakefield, R.I.
In this video, part of a series of roundtable discussions with leading health policy analysts and academic primary care physicians and mental health specialists, Dr. Damle and Dr. Lee Beers, the medical director for municipal and regional affairs at Children’s National Health System, Washington, discuss the essential steps physician practices must take in order to survive – and thrive – in a value-based care environment.
These steps include: team-based care, inclusion of mental health services, flexible IT electronic health record systems, quality measures tailored to your practice’s competencies and patient panel, and adequate funding.
Whether you’ve already begun the transition to a value-based system, or have yet to begin, this video will help focus your efforts and expectations of what’s to come.
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Start with incremental steps so you can get momentum going so that you end up where you want to be,” says Dr. Beers.
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